I spoke at the 2020 Friends Of Kloofendal annual general meeting. I had a few requests for a copy of the presentation. Instead of emailing text, I recorded an audio file of the presentation.
From a pure monetary point of view, a puppy is worth more than a spider. However, which one offers the most benefit to humans and in what way? Which contributes more to human survival and which would have the greater impact if it became extinct? We can answer these questions by considering the benefits that the puppy and the spider offer.
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report of 2005 defined the Ecosystem Services Framework as a way of recognising the benefits that mankind derives from nature. It is not based upon a monetary value, but rather on the value of benefits that we receive directly or indirectly. Ecosystem services originate from an aspect of the environment that may be a single animal or plant, or a collection of “things” such as a wetland, forest or mountain range.
Jochen Zeitz, executive chairman of Puma and chief sustainability officer, said “The unprecedented Puma Environmental Profit and Loss Account has been indispensable for us to realize the immense value of nature’s services that are currently being taken for granted but without which companies could not sustain themselves.”
To help us understand ecosystem services and the value that they offer, they can be grouped into the following four categories:
Supporting services are necessary for all other ecosystem services. Due to the connectedness of nature, many aspects fall into this category. Water for example, provides vital supporting services to all life on Earth as it is consumed by all plants and animals. Without it, life as we know it, would not exist.
Provisioning services are those resources that we receive from nature. Fish provide food, trees provide building materials and metals from the earth provide the raw materials.
Regulating services maintain the world as we know it. Predators such as snakes, crocodiles, spiders and scorpions prey upon other animals and, in doing so, remove sick, old or dying animals from the environment. They keep animal populations in check and ensure their genetic fitness.
The last group of services are cultural services – those intangible aspects that provide recreation, spiritual and historical benefits.
When we compare the ecological services that a puppy and spider provide, we may feel that the spider offers the most benefits. However, the services that we gain from both the puppy and spider add value, but in different ways. Ecologically speaking, spiders are important middle tier predators. If we left them alone in our house, they would provide a free and natural pest control service. However, a puppy also provides ecosystem services, but in its own unique way.
Valuing of aspects of nature should never be calculated in terms of profit and loss. We need to broaden our gaze and realise that the human race has by no means the capacity and understanding to rate one aspect of the environment over another. Mankind has been fully dependant on ecosystem services since the beginning of its existence. Eroding these services through short sighted mechanisms of greed and ego creates a long term ecosystem service deficit, resulting in social and environmental degradation.
Another way that we abuse the world’s capacity to withstand human activities is by treating it as a place to dispose of our waste. We create huge amounts of waste that is not designed to be disposed of, and then hide it in the ground, release it into the air, or dump it into a nearby river or sea. Many consider that once the waste is out of sight or has been “disposed of”, then we have no more responsibilities. But, this is where the problems begin.
In William Rathje and Cullen Murphy’s book, Rubbish! The Archaeology Of Garbage, they write “There is a popular notion that in its depths, the typical municipal landfill is a locus of roiling fermentation, of intense chemical and biological activity. The truth is, however, that the dynamics of a modern landfill are very nearly the opposite of what most people think. Biologically and chemically, a landfill is a much more static structure than is commonly supposed.”
Somewhere, near where you live, there is a landfill where all your rubbish goes, as does your neighbours rubbish and your community’s rubbish. It is not a nice place, because the ground water is often contaminated from dissolved solids and organic compounds, and toxic emissions fill the air.
We may be surprised to learn how long it takes for some disposable items to decompose:
If Leonardo da Vinci used a plastic knife and fork during a lunch break while he painted the Mona Lisa in 1506, they would still be usable today. If Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart sipped bottled water while writing his music in 1780, that plastic bottle would also still be usable today!
Plastic is truly a curse of convenience that we all have to contend with. Irrespective of whether Mozart’s water bottle or Leonardo’s knife and fork had been recycled into other products or thrown away, they would still be in existence today. The environmental costs associated with many plastic items far out weigh their use.
There is pattern, and a common trend in the way that we abuse the environment for profit; something that was written about almost 200 years ago.
In 1833, William Forster Lloyd published an article in which he described the effects of the overuse of a common resource. In the early 1800’s, common land was used by herders to graze their cattle, for which they derived a free benefit. A herder could get more benefit from this arrangement, if more of his cattle were moved onto the land. However, there was a tendency for herders to graze too many cattle, which resulted in overgrazing and the destruction of the common resource. In this scenario, the land was degraded and rendered unusable beyond recovery.
Further to Lloyd’s article, in 1968, ecologist Garett Hardin wrote a paper entitled ‘The Tragedy Of The Commons”. In his paper, Hardin re-conceptualised the “commons” to be any kind of free, shared and unregulated resource, illustrating how mankind damages these resources through exploitation and greed. Modern examples of free resources that succumb to the tragedy of the commons include:
Tragedy of the commons can be described as having your house broken into many times by a thief. The first time, the thief breaks into your house and steals the most valuable and easily removed items. Your TV, jewellery, cash, cellphones and cameras. The thief noticed other items of value, so a few weeks later, he breaks in again, and steals these items. The third time the thief breaks in, he steals yet more items. Eventually, all the items of value have been stolen. This process of taking the most valuable items first, and then moving on to the next most valuable items, is called serial depletion.
In some instances, complex social schemes such as the Kyoto Protocol, Paris Climate Agreement, United Nations, CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species), marine reserves and national parks have been implemented to protect the environment from exploitation. Public interest groups may lobby governments into taking action against guilty organisations. The rise of social media and monitoring organisations such as Greenpeace, Oceana, World Wildlife Fund and Wikileaks are powerful platforms to express contempt and expose how some organisations do business when they think no one is looking.
The miracle of nature is that whenever there has been a challenge, there is an organism that has found a way to conquer it. There are an estimated 30 million plants and animals on Earth which are essentially individual science experiments, perpetually testing out new ways of doing things in order to find a better way.
After 4.8 billion years of natural capital accumulation, nature has come up with some ingenious ways to deal with some of life’s most pressing challenges. Since humans live under the same laws of nature and under the same conditions, it makes sense that we learn from the inner workings of the natural world.
In order to be truly innovative, we must look beyond our limited understanding of the world around us. If we lack the fundamental understanding of the natural world, we will never see the opportunities that nature has to offer. However, in order to be open to the possibilities that nature provides and begin to build a new sustainable world, we must not lose sight of the following:
The focus on Nature as a source of innovation has been formalised through the practice of biomimicry and the science of biotechnology. There is no doubt that we have much to learn from this 4.8 billion year old jigsaw puzzle that is the world we live in today.
Biomimicry and biotechnology promise to solve some of our greatest problems. However, we have to change the way we identify value in the world in order to see the unlimited possibilities that are all around us. Ironically, it is often the most unlikely animals and plants that have provided us with the greatest technological breakthroughs.
Another area of great interest is the application of biological aspects of nature to create new technologies. New technologies are being discovered from areas of the natural world that we once thought were of no benefit to mankind. It is an exciting field of study simply because it is limited only by our imagination and the ability to identify solutions hidden within the natural world.
The study of venoms has developed into a formal field of research. This focused interest is fuelled by the possibility of discovering revolutionary medical science through venoms and their individual components. With over 100,000 different venomous animals in the world the opportunities for developing new biotechnology is almost unlimited.
The indian cobra (Naja naja) is responsible for thousands of deaths per year in India. However, according to research, its venom holds the secret to treat a disease that affects more than 350 million people worldwide: Arthritis.
The venom of the wandering spider (Phoneutria nigriventa) in South America has aroused a great deal of the interest. In male patients, the bite from this spider cause long lasting erections. Considering that Viagra sales in 2015 topped $1.7bn, the venom from this spider is something to get very excited about. It is estimated that in 2019, the market value for these drugs will be $3.4bn. Imagine if mankind could isolate and replicate the responsible component.
Components of black mamba (Dendroaspis polylepis) venom have been isolated to produce some of the worlds most effective pain killers that have no side effects and are up to 7 times more effective than morphine.
Venom from the death stalker scorpion (Androctonus crassicauda) is being used to treat certain cancers as well as Alzheimer’s disease.
The gila monster (Heloderma suspectum) is a venomous lizard from northern America whose venom is being used to create a treatment for diabetes. The World Health Organisation estimated that there were 422 million people with Type 2 diabetes in 2014.
The naturally occurring components of venom provide a convenient point of origin. Once we have a basic understanding of how these venoms “work”, we have a clue to their application. The components of these venoms can then be artificially synthesized and manufactured.
Spider silk has been given much attention over the past few years. It is antibacterial, it can stretch over 300% of its own length, and with a higher tensile strength than steel, it is in a class of its own. The Canadian company Nexia, has developed genetically modified goats that produce spider silk proteins in their milk. Although this has solved the problem of producing spider silk in large quantities, the project failed to produce an end product as they couldn’t realign these proteins into fibres.
In the 1800’s, life expectancy of the average person was only 36. After Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming discovered the properties of penicillin mould in 1926, life expectancy increased to 50.
Other examples of biotechnology include:
The elegant design of nature offers inherent solutions to natural problems. However, we must be careful to use biotechnology only in its original and pure form. Tampering with nature at a genetic level has already caused unexpected consequences that have resulted in harmful knock-on effects.
History has taught us is that trying to improve on nature often results in unintended consequences. Biotechnology from genetically modified organisms poses a threat to biodiversity and raises many ethical questions regarding the way it is created, marketed and consumed.
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